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| New video: "Is the Voynich Manuscript fake?" |
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Posted by: Koen G - 19-11-2024, 11:38 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (84)
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I finally finished my new video. This one is about fraud, forgery and fakery of all kinds. Meaning, lack of meaning, good intentions, bad intentions, John Dee, Wilfrid Voynich or the Crossbowman.
This video is the one that took me the longest to make so far. It includes both known and new research and highlights some lesser known aspects as well. As usual, I tried to learn some new animations along the way, and attempted to keep it visually interesting.
I owe thanks to Lisa, Rene and Marco for their input and factchecking of the script, and to Cary for reviewing the video before publication.
I also provided English subtitles, which should make it a bit easier to watch for those who like them.
Enjoy!
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| Why create such a complex cipher? |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 17-11-2024, 04:07 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (26)
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Hi!
I was listening to another video about the manuscript today and in the QnA section, someone asked: "What motivations would there be for creating it as a hoax with random gibberish?"
I wasn't too impressed with the answer, and instead it got me thinking the complete opposite way: If you are writing a book on [botany/women's health/astronomy/etc] and you want to encode it, why create such an incredibly difficult to crack cipher?
As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of the Zodiac ciphers from the 1970s. I'm sure most cipher nerds know that the Z-340 was cracked about four years ago now. It was cracked through a computer brute forcing every imaginable way to encode a text, and eventually, after the computer had cracked it, the investigators realized that not only had Zodiac used a highly sophisticated way of scrambling letters; he had made mistakes! So it was only possible to crack a very difficult cipher with mistakes through brute force computer. How is it that that the Voynich Manuscript has survived even longer, and more importantly, why the need to create this level of difficult cipher?
If all you are doing is hiding information about botany, why do you need to go to such lengths as the scribes did? Iirc both Alan Turing and the guy who cracked the Japanese code in WW2 worked on the manuscript (and failed), so, if you're a 14th century botanist who wants to hid information about your plants, why do you need a cipher that is more difficult to crack than the Germans and Japanese used in a world war?
There is a really good video about the Z-340 cipher here on YouTube (link below). Looking at that, the sheer power of computer brute force solving, I am feeling less and less that there is any meaning to the text. And I ask: "why the need to create such a complex cipher?"
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| How could it be proven it's a medieval hoax? |
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Posted by: djurpet - 17-11-2024, 03:17 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Apologies if this has already been covered. I'm just wondering if such a thing would even be possible to prove. For example, lets assume that a few scribes from the 15th century knew that a local ruler is willing to pay a lot of money for obscure/occult books and they decided to make one in a script that visually has some resemblance to a real language but has no meaning.
We know that certain symbols are almost exclusively used as suffixes or prefixes so they must have had some algorithm/method for generating the text. If someone finds a convincing method for generating voynichese words (maybe that's already been done, idk) would that be enough evidence to conclude it's a medieval hoax? Or what other evidence would be needed?
The problems with this theory are that there was probably no need for the makers of VM to bother with a method for generating words for a meaningless text that they wanted to sell to someone - they could have just arranged the letters totally randomly. Also, there are some words that are concentrated in parts of the book that cover similar topics which could suggest that the text actually has meaning - or it could suggest that the scribe who worked on the herbal parts maybe had one method for generating words and the scribe who worked on the cosmological part had a slightly different method.
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| It must be a language - because how much about linguistics did they know so long ago? |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 15-11-2024, 11:30 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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One of the most interesting things about this manuscript is that it follows certain hard rules about texts and corpus. Specifically with reference to things like hapax legomena, which I find fascinating in and of itself (I used hapax legomena for a small section of my master's thesis).
It has always made me wonder: how much of the rules of natural language was known in 14th century HRE/Central Europe?
Like, suppose it is all a big hoax, would the hoaxer have been aware that all corpus have a set amount of hapax legomena? Would he have planned for it in commissioning the book? Would he have expected his buyer to look for hapax legomena, and that the potential buyer might have looked at the text and gone: "Hmrph, not enough hapax legomena, clearly not a language."
If that wasn't known, then there's no way that it would happen accidentally, right?
How much do we know about what they knew about conlangs in the 14th century?
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| It cannot be a language - in reference to Koen's latest video |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 15-11-2024, 11:23 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Koen did a fantastic video about a month ago where he showed that Voynich really only has 8 functional letters. I've racked my brains trying to come up with any language even close to that and the closest I can think of is if Japanese dropped the diacritics and the syllabary structure of the written language. They would still end up with 14 characters!
Vowels:
a
i
u
e
o
Consonants:
k
s
t
n
h
m
y
r
w
This is setting aside the fact that there are still five more consonants in the Japanese language, g z d b p, which are currently marked by diactritics. I'm not sure if a Japanese speaker would be able to comfortable read a text without diacritics. You could also, perhaps, merge n and m into one one sound as the ん (n) can make both [n] and [m] sounds depending on what sounds follow it.
So, bending and breaking every concievable rule, Japanese can, at best, get down to 13 characters, and in doing so making the reading process quite arduous. And thats 60% more characters than the Voynich manuscript has!
It just can't be a language. It cannot...
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| Was the color original? A (very crude) analysis of color in Herbal A and Herbal B |
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Posted by: addekallstrom - 08-11-2024, 11:02 AM - Forum: Physical material
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Hi!
This is my first post, I am not a color expert, I am not a statistician, but I do have some interesting data that someone more qualified could expand upon.
In some of the recent YouTube videos by Koen, it was argued (I thought very persuasively) that the scribes also painted the paintings. This made me wonder: can we see a difference in what colors are used on the flowers? Can this be used to determine if the color is original or if it was added later?
My contention is the following:
(a) if the color was added later, there would be no difference in coloring between Herbal A and Herbal B, since a later painter would not know the difference.
thus,
(b) if there is any noticable difference in how color is used between Herbal A and Herbal B, it must mean that the color is original.
I conducted a very simple test. I separated all paintings of flowers into Herbal A or Herbal B on voynichese.com
I then asked a simple question: "what colors are found on the page?" and did a simple "yes/no" for each color I found.
I grouped it the following way:
It is very simple, and not very precise, but having gone through every image of flowers in Herbal A and Herbal B, I did find some striking results:
Herbal A colors:
Herbal B colors:
As you can see, there is a stark difference between the usage of the color red.
The only pages where Herbal B uses red are: f40v, f46v, f55r, and f95r1.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might actually be brown and not even red. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. only uses a miniscule amount of red, if not a very reddish brown. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses a reddish brown again.
f95r1 is the only Herbal B where I feel that red is definitely used, and it is only small dots.
Compare that to the use of red (or very reddish brown) which is used extensively, on basically half of all pages, in Herbal A.
This indicates at the very least that the scribe of Herbal B didn't like red. Or perhaps that Herbal B wasn't completely finished, since there is white on almost every single Herbal B page, and maybe red was only used as a finishing color(?).
In any way, speculation aside, there is a clear, stark difference in the usage of the color red between Herbal A and Herbal B. This could not have been the case if the color was added later by someone who didn't know the difference between Herbal A and Herbal B.
My humble conclusion, therefore, is that the color was added by the scribes. I am sure that someone better equipped to do these kinds of experiments could find even more robust research. I am not very good at these things.
Thank you for reading.
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| Aott-naL |
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Posted by: Jon Bold - 02-11-2024, 05:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I have been looking at the VM for a few years and I think I have some incremental ideas about the text and some ideas about what the VM is. I am not going to “read it to you”, I would rather show you how to read it. I hope you can recognize and handle the genuine article.
Now, I am going to swim upstream against a lot of popular answers out there and say some things nobody else has said. Starting with: The images of plants, etc. were on the pages before the texts were written. Most of the text has nothing to do with the images.
I think what’s written here is music, a melody line, perhaps in a pentatonic scale, but the lyrics are missing. Could it be liturgical music? Not gregorian chant but perhaps plainsong. If so, we know the words. One of the reasons it is hard for us to believe this is music is how weird and convoluted the Italian system of music is that we use today.
Here is some information the cryptologists should be interested in. There is one short straight line segment in the midst of each of the characters. Most of the characters of the text are distracting serifs, entry swirls, exit swirls etc. the informative part of the character is often nothing more than a horizontal line segment, a vertical line segment, a diagonal line segment, three or four parallel line segments, a cruciform, or a saltier.
Which leaves only about five to nine basic characters, not enough for an alphabet. This is not language. It is a (non-Tironian) shorthand or a code. There are enough characters for a musical scale of one “octave”.
There are other reasons why I think this is a private system for documenting a melody. Notice how often consecutive lines differ by one or very few characters. Typical of hymns. I suspect His Majesty, with a good sense of pitch, was writing the melody down while listening to it.
There are some specific characters with tentative meaning: Starting many lines, there is a common character made of four line segments connected with loopy corners, that means “Four Beats”. Trace this character in the air, starting with a rising line and you will feel like you are a conductor. It is often followed by four characters which I think are notations about those four beats.
Similarly, the character made of three line segments with two loopy top corners means “Three Beats” and is often followed by three characters.
“Two Beats” looks like “three beats” but the upper left loop is missing. It would be followed by two characters.
There are many examples where a beat character is written over the first character in a line. Perhaps the scribe wrote the line and came back to fill in the beat character after counting the beats.
A space between characters might be a repeat or sustain of the preceding character. Or, it might be a natural break between lines of text. But, they seem useful in locating the beginning of a string of characters, where we will find one of the “beat” characters, which tell us how many characters follow.
This makes the character that looks like an (8) and the character that looks like an (o) special characters.
If I am at all correct about any of this, then we should be able to count up the beats in a line of text to know the meter of it, and possibly relate our findings to known examples of very old music, like Veni Veni Emmanuel, or Personent Hodie.
I will venture a guess. The horizontal line is the tonic and the same line with a vertical line above it is the octave. I have no proof. I may substitute values into the other symbols to see if this turns into recognizable music.
On another subject, The ladies. There are multiple sketches of Her majesty receiving a barrel of cool water and a bottle of wine. Fifteenth century gynecology? On the top of page 140 ( left 78) Her Majesty is, isn’t it obvious, cleaning out her fallopian tubes. There is only one lady in all those sketches.
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